Bill Gates’ story is a quintessential example of the American entrepreneurial dream: A brilliant math whiz, Gates was 19 when he dropped out of Harvard and cofounded Microsoft with his friend Paul Allen in 1975.
Even before founding one of the world’s most valuable companies, Gates’ life was anything but ordinary. He grew up in a well-off and well-connected family, surrounded by his parents’ rarefied personal and professional network. Their circle included a Cabinet secretary and a governor of Washington, according to “Hard Drive,” the 1992 biography of Gates by James Wallace and Jim Erickson. (Brock Adams, who went on to become the transportation secretary in the Carter administration, is said to have introduced Gates’ parents.)
His father, William Gates Sr., was a prominent corporate lawyer in Seattle and the president of the Washington State Bar Association.
His mother, Mary Gates, came from a line of successful bankers and sat on the boards of important financial and social institutions, including the nonprofit United Way. It was there, according to her New York Times obituary, that she met the former IBM chairman John Opel — a fateful connection thought to have led to IBM enlisting Microsoft to provide an operating system in the 1980s.
“My parents were well off — my dad did well as a lawyer, took us on great trips, we had a really nice house,” Gates said in the 2019 Netflix documentary “Inside Bill’s Brain.”
“And I’ve had so much luck in terms of all these opportunities.”
Despite his very public life, his three children with French Gates — Jennifer, Rory, and Phoebe — largely avoided the spotlight for most of their upbringing.
Like their father, the three Gates children attended Seattle’s elite Lakeside School, a private high school that has been recognized for excellence in STEM subjects — and that received a $40 million donation from Bill Gates in 2005 to build its financial aid fund. (Bill Gates and Paul Allen met at Lakeside and went on to build Microsoft together.)
But as they have become adults, more details have emerged about their interests, professions, and family life.
While they have chosen different career paths, all three children are active in philanthropy — a space in which they will likely wield immense influence as they grow older. While their father has reportedly said that he plans to leave each of the Gates three children $10 million — a fraction of his fortune — they may inherit the family foundation, where most of his money will go.
Here’s all we know about the Gates children.
Gates and his children did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
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